Top 10 VMware Admin Tools
VMware admins use a number of tools to help monitor, manage, and optimize their virtual environments. Recently I surveyed the VMware community to find the most popular tools and shared the top 10 on episode 184 of the Virtually Speaking Podcast. As you already know, there are a lot more than 10 VMware admin tools. This post reveals the top 10 from the poll as well as a list of lesser-known tools that admins might find useful.
#1 PowerCLI
VMware PowerCLI is a command-line and scripting tool built on Windows PowerShell and provides more than 600 cmdlets for managing and automating vSphere, vCloud, vRealize Operations Manager, vSAN, NSX-T, VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware HCX, VMware Site Recovery Manager, and VMware Horizon environments.
Visit the PowerCLI page on VMware {code} and choose your release to learn about PowerCLI.
# To install PowerCLI just open a PowerShell console and run the command below:
Install-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI#2 RVTools by Rob de Veij
More than 1.4 million copies downloaded
RVTools is a VMware utility that connects to your vCenter server and captures every bit of information about your virtual machines (VMs) and your ESXi hosts that you’d want to know. It is able to list information about VMs, CPU, Memory, Disks, Partitions, Network, Floppy drives, CD drives, Snapshots, VMware tools, Resource pools, Clusters, ESX hosts, HBAs, NICs, Switches, Ports, Distributed Switches, Distributed Ports, Service consoles, VM Kernels, Datastores, multi-path info, license info, and health checks. It does it fast and in a format that readily exports to Excel.
The download is free, but you have to register with Veeam before you get your download. By downloading, you agree to join Veeam’s mailing list, which you can choose to unsubscribe from, but don’t unsubscribe too quickly, Veeam offers some great VMware-related products, many free of charge.
The latest version is of RVTools is 4.1.4
#3 ESXTOP
With vSphere comes a very handy tool, called ESXTOP, which is great for helping IT Pros pinpoint performance issues quickly. It is a command-line tool that can be used to collect data and provide real-time information on the resource usage of a vSphere environment such as CPU, disk, memory, and network usage.
#4 vCheck by Alan Renouf
vCheck is a PowerShell HTML framework script, the script is designed to run as a scheduled task before you get into the office to present you with key information via an email directly to your inbox in a nice easily readable format. This script picks on the key known issues and potential issues scripted as plugins for various technologies written as PowerShell scripts and reports it all in one place so all you do in the morning is check your email.
#5 vCenter Converter
vCenter Converter quickly converts local and remote physical machines into virtual machines without any downtime. The Centralized management console allows you to queue up and monitor many simultaneous conversions, both local and remote, (i.e. headquarters and branch offices).
#6 vDiagram
The vDiagram project is based on a PowerShell script originally created by @alanrenouf. It was then picked up by @jtrainmar & @vDiagram_Tony. vDiagram draws VMware environments in Visio. Download vDiagram 2.0.
#7 AsBuilt Reports by Tim Carman
AsBuilt Report is a configuration document framework that uses Microsoft PowerShell and PScribo, to generate and build as-built report documents in HTML, XML, Text & MS Word document formats.
AsBuilt Report is an open-source project developed primarily for IT professionals to allow them to easily produce ‘as built’ configuration documentation that is clear and consistent, across multiple IT vendors and technologies.
The framework allows users to easily run and generate reports against their IT environments and provides contributors the ability to easily create new reports for any IT vendor and/or technology that supports PowerShell and/or a RESTful API.
#8 mRemoteNG
mRemoteNG is a fork of mRemote: an open-source, tabbed, multi-protocol, remote connections manager. mRemoteNG adds bug fixes and new features to mRemote.
It allows you to view all of your remote connections in a simple yet powerful tabbed interface.
mRemoteNG supports the following protocols:
- RDP (Remote Desktop/Terminal Server)
- VNC (Virtual Network Computing)
- ICA (Citrix Independent Computing Architecture)
- SSH (Secure Shell)
- Telnet (TELecommunication NETwork)
- HTTP/HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
- rlogin
- Raw Socket Connections
#9 HCI Bench
HCIBench stands for "Hyper-converged Infrastructure Benchmark". It's essentially an automation wrapper around the popular and proven open-source benchmark tools: Vdbench and Fio that make it easier to automate testing across an HCI cluster. HCIBench aims to simplify and accelerate customer POC performance testing in a consistent and controlled way. The tool fully automates the end-to-end process of deploying test VMs, coordinating workload runs, aggregating test results, performance analysis, and collecting necessary data for troubleshooting purposes.
HCIBench is not only a benchmark tool designed for vSAN, but also could be used to evaluate the performance of all kinds of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Storage in vSphere environment.
#10 vSAN ReadyNode Sizer
vSAN ReadyNodes provide the most flexible server options to build Hyper-Converged Infrastructure based on VMware vSAN. Selecting a vSAN ReadyNode is simple. Choose the vSAN version you want to deploy, pick a ReadyNode profile based on your specific needs, select your preferred server vendor, and then pick one of the available models.
Refer to this step-by-step guide on How to Configure a vSAN ReadyNode
Honorable Mention
The good news is there are more than 10 great tools for VMware admins to use. The following is a list of other tools that were mentioned.
IOInsight – VMware Fling
VMware IOInsight is a tool to help people understand a VM’s storage I/O behavior. By understanding their VM’s I/O characteristics, customers can make better decisions at storage capacity planning and performance tuning. IOInsight ships as a virtual appliance that can be deployed in any vSphere environment and an intuitive web-based UI allows users to choose VMDKs to monitor and view results.
Log Insight
VMware vRealize Log Insight is a virtual appliance that allows administrators to view, manage and analyze Syslog data. Log Insight gives administrators the ability to consolidate logs, monitor and troubleshoot vSphere, and to perform security auditing and compliance testing.
VMware Skyline
VMware Skyline is an automated, proactive support technology that helps customers avoid problems before they occur and reduce time to resolution of active support requests. For customers, VMware Skyline can increase team productivity and the overall reliability of VMware environments.
vDocumentation (Ariel and Edgar Sanchez)
vDocumentation provides a community-created set of PowerCLI scripts that produce infrastructure documentation of vSphere environments in CSV or Excel file format.
Postman
Postman is a powerful HTTP client for testing web services. Created by Abhinav Asthana, a programmer, and designer based in Bangalore, India, Postman makes it easy to test, develop and document APIs by allowing users to quickly put together both simple and complex HTTP requests.
WinSSHterm
WinSSHterm is a tabbed SSH solution for Windows, combining PuTTY/KiTTY, WinSCP, and VcXsrv.
Linux VSM
Linux VSM, written by Edward Haletky, is a port of the VMware Software Manager to Linux. Linux VSM allows you to log in to My VMware, uses the My VMware downloads information and presents to the user the subset of downloads VSM allows.
Hyper.is
The goal of Hyper.is is to create a beautiful and extensible experience for command-line interface users, built on open web standards. In the beginning, the focus has been primarily around speed, stability, and the development of the correct API for extension authors.
In the future, the group anticipates the community will come up with innovative additions to enhance what could be the simplest, most powerful, and well-tested interface for productivity.
Git
Git is a mature, actively maintained open source project originally developed in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, the famous creator of the Linux operating system kernel. A staggering number of software projects rely on Git for version control, including commercial projects as well as open-source. Developers who have worked with Git are well represented in the pool of available software development talent and it works well on a wide range of operating systems and IDEs (Integrated Development Environments).
Take a look at github.com/vmware
pgAdmin
pgAdmin is a management tool for PostgreSQL and derivative relational databases such as EnterpriseDB’s EDB Advanced Server. Documentation for the current development code, and recent major releases of the application are available at pgadmin.org.
VMware OS Optimization Tool
The VMware OS Optimization Tool helps optimize Windows 7/8/2008/2012/10 systems for use with VMware Horizon View. The optimization tool includes customizable templates to enable or disable Windows system services and features, per VMware recommendations and best practices, across multiple systems. Since most Windows system services are enabled by default, the optimization tool can be used to easily disable unnecessary services and features to improve performance.
You can perform the following actions using the VMware OS Optimization Tool:
- Local Analyze/Optimize
- Remote Analyze
- Optimization History and Rollback
- Managing Templates
VMware vRealize Orchestrator
VMware vRealize Orchestrator™ doesn’t get nearly enough attention. It’s one of the most powerful tools available to VMware administrators, and it doesn’t require any licensing beyond your existing vCenter licenses. In a drag-and-drop graphical user interface, vRealize Orchestrator allows us to create workflows that can automate many of the tasks we do daily. Not only that, but vRealize Orchestrator has a large library of plug-ins available from VMware Solution Exchange that give you additional functionality for third-party software and hardware in your environment.
Sexigraf
SexiGraf is a “Ready-To-Graf” virtual appliance made by the community for the community! Feel free to follow SexiGraf on @sexigraf_fr
Sexigraf for vSAN
The metrics used in the various vSAN dashboards are collected every few minutes using the QueryVsanStatistics API method of HostVsanInternalSystem. With some json ticks, it is possible to access any metrics from the vSAN cluster.
PoCLI
The pocli package provides a lightweight ownCloud command-line client for basic file operations such as upload, download, directory creation and listing, and deletion. It is written in Python and built upon the official pyocclient package.
The development of pocli was motivated by the need for a tool to quickly up- or download single (or few) files on a computer that is operated without any graphical user interface (i.e. a typical HPC system), and where it may not be desirable to install the official client software.
VMware Health Analyzer
VMware Health Analyzer (or vHA) is a tool used by VMware Partners / Solution Providers in order to assess a VMware environment based on a standard set of best practices. At this point in time, it’s only available for VMware Employees or Partners with access to Partner Central.
Ansible
Out of the box, Ansible ships with over 50 VMware modules supporting most use cases, including:
- Managing vSphere datacenters, clusters, hosts and guests
- VM template and snapshot management
- vSwitches, DNS settings, firewall rules and NAT gateway rules
Ansible also ships with integrations to support physical network devices for all leading vendors. Additionally, NSX modules are available for teams looking to automate network virtualization.
Conclusion
There are so many tools to help VMware administrators plan, deploy, and manage VMware environments. This list is just a collection of tools I was able to capture in my recent poll. Is there something missing that you use? Let me know, and I will add it to this post.